12 Jul, 2022

Pete Cohen  0:01

Happy beautiful, amazing day. It's Pete Cohen here. Welcome to the Future Self Podcast. today's podcast is called your Future Self. I'll see you after the theme tune.

Pete Cohen  0:36

Hey, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. I am super excited to share a subject that I'm so passionate about. I think one of the most incredible things that any human being can do is to be excited or enthusiastic about something is in front of them. I think it's one of the most powerful memories I don't know how many of you can remember when you were young. And you were excited about something you had to tell someone. You've done something you've achieved something. There was something you wanted to do or even you know your birthday and you knew the next morning you were going to get presents or Christmas. You knew that there was something in front of you that you wanted to be a part of. And maybe it was actually that you wanted to give something to other people. Look, I'm genuinely concerned about the future. I'm genuinely concerned about everything that we have been through. This all kind of came to the fore again with an incident that happened recently with Will Smith. And I think everybody knows about that. But one of the things he said in his apology, was it he was embarrassed because it wasn't in keeping with the person who he wants to be. And I'm really interested in our relationship to the future. And when I was a child, if someone said to me, Hey, Pete, what do you want to do? When you grow up? I probably would have said, I want to be a footballer. I wanted to be an actor. But then when I got a little bit older, I didn't really think about the future. I wasn't interested in it. All I was interested in was the weekend. All I was interested in was having enough money in my pocket that I can hang out with my friends and play sport, drink, do other things which young young people do. I wasn't interested in next year or next week, next month. I wasn't even interested in but you know as a coach and that's what I am and have spent so much of my life really wanting to help people go from where they are to where they want to be because ultimately that's what a coach is right? The word coach comes from a Coach and Horses you are somewhere. You want to go somewhere. But let's be honest, most people don't actually know where they want to go. They know where they don't want to go. It's like if someone goes to the doctor, why do they go to the doctor? Well, because they're in pain, right? So if you're in pain, what do you want to do? You want to get out of pain. And the doctor he can help you probably get out a pen, but he can't help you be well. He doesn't really know how that make you be really well they just know how to stop you or prevent you from being sick. But what I found so fascinating was when I was a personal trainer in 1989 was asking people what they wanted because someone joins a gym they pay a lot of money to join a gym and you got to sit in a room with them and close the door. It's just you and them and I'm 19 in many cases, they're older than me and I'm asking them what do they want and I'm writing stuff down and then I do some tests on them and then give them a card that says poor average, below average. And then I got to show them in the gym. They don't feel at home there. But I didn't know this. I didn't know because I was young. They didn't know what they wanted. They knew what they didn't want, knew what the problem was. And you know, we think in pictures, we all think in pictures. So if someone comes to you and they don't know what they want, what are they going to get and if the driver which was getting them to join the gym in the first place was they're in pain. They're overweight, you know, their buckle on the belt just doesn't, you know or they've been told they're diabetic or you know something's happened that's made them join the gym. They're in pain. What do human beings do when they get out of pain?

So fascinating to me, what do we do? I believe that everything that we do is driven by our desire to get out of pain. And what is pain pain can be being bored or stuck or lonely or sad, or irritable or frightened or uncertain that when we feel something in the body that comes from in most cases from our thoughts. We don't want to stay in that state. So we'll immediately find a way to get out of pain and we live in a world that is trapped us into behaving in ways that I believe is destroying our creativity, destroying our ability to communicate, destroying our ability to build a future that we want. It's killing us and I actually do believe that most people in the day in the world today are living a future that they don't want. I do believe that I believe that most people will end up in a place and go How did I get here? How did I end up here? I didn't want to be here. Most people we live in a world where their attention is being sold to the highest bidder. That's where the agents that work with all the social media companies and the TV companies, media companies. They want your attention. They want you to do something that you probably don't really need to do to think something to buy something to do something we have lost our ability to be free thinkers. That's how I see it and it might sound a little bit crazy, but I'm concerned I'm concerned about the young people of today. I'm concerned about you know how they see the future who they're pursuing. I think a lot of people are pursuing ideals of somebody else rather than deciding who they actually want to become. And what I want to share with you today is a few examples of this. I want to give you a different perspective of this because I'm definitely not here to tell you that I am right and you're wrong. You know, I know that people don't change when we tell them what to do. We know people change when their perspective changes. So this is Meg Jay. She's a clinical psychologist and she talks about the empathy gap. Take a listen to this.

Meg Jay  7:07

So philosopher Derek Parfit said we neglect our future selves because of some sort of failure of belief or imagination. So I'm going to say that again, because it's really important. We neglect our future selves because of some sort of failure of belief, or imagination. But that's a problem because research shows that our brains think about our future selves, similarly to how they think about strangers. And that's where the empathy gap comes in. It can be difficult for us to care about a version of ourselves that we haven't met yet. Yet. Research also shows that if we find a way to close that empathy gap between our present selves and our future selves, we start to think more about what we could do now to be kind to ourselves down the line. So the idea here is just to try to get to know your future self.

Pete Cohen  8:01

I mean, could you get to know your future self I mean, you're going to meet your future self anyway. But what we've done what we've seen in in the labs is when we wire people's brains up, we look at brain activity. We asked them to think of themselves. We see a part of the brain light up we ask them to think of a stranger we see a different part of the brain light up. We ask people to think of themselves tomorrow next week. They know who that person is. So the part of the brain of themselves lights up, but if you go beyond that, six months a year, people don't know who that person is the stranger part of the brain lights up. If you don't know who that person is, why would you have empathy for someone you don't know? You would only have empathy for who you know. And that's you. And this is called identity. This is why personality testing for me is not the greatest tool on Earth. I believe our personality is the person that we're choosing to become. And maybe you've been told you're a certain type of person. But most people are just choosing to become exactly who they are today because that's who they think that they are. And every day, they look at themselves in the mirror and they recognize Oh, that's me. How do I think how do I act? How do I feel and they just go on repeat. And unless we wake up to the reality of what we're doing and who we're becoming, we're going to have a problem. Take a listen to another person who works in the field of future self science. This is Hal Hershfield

Hal Hershfield  9:29

I know it sounds a little weird to think about the future self as another person. But if you stop and take that notion seriously, I think it really helps explain why so many of us privileged today, over tomorrow. Think about how we treat other people. If we care for them. If we feel a sense of connection toward them. We'll make sacrifices for them, just like we do for our children. Our aging parents and theoretically are spouses. And the same can be said for our future selves. If we feel a sense of connection to our future selves. We're going to make sacrifices today so that they have a better life in the distant future.

Pete Cohen  10:07

Again, it's very simple concept. But you know all the work I've done with people, the greatest thing I've seen human beings do is when they identify the person they want to become and they become that person. And they've written great examples of this in history. So one great example obviously is Ghandi. And right now, again, these words should be resonating with us more than ever with war going on, you know him saying well be the change that you want to see in this world. And you know, and if you can't be that change, then get out of the way and support the people that can and now we're seeing people behave in ways, especially in Ukraine, Ukraine, borders, I think seven different countries. And you see lots of these countries opening the borders and behaving in a way they wouldn't normally behave. I've seen this before. I've seen this so many times. But then after the disaster goes away, and hopefully it will soon people go back to where they were before. What do we need? We need all of us to be inspired about the possibilities that exist for our future. This is Dr. Benjamin Hardy.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy  11:14

There's a concept in positive psychology that's pretty much changed how a lot of psychologists view everything about people. It's called prospection. And what the idea of prospection is, is that as human beings, one of the things that makes us fundamentally different from all other species is that we have the ability to think about and imagine our future. Not only that though, whatever you see for your future, your future self is the thing that drives your current self more than anything else. Whatever you see for your future, is the thing driving your your views, your identity, your behavior in the present. This is why hope is so powerful. If you have a hopeful, purposeful, exciting future, then what do you think that does for your present? It means you're motivated, you're exciting you you're clear, you're intentional. If you're hopeless towards the future or pessimistic towards the future. What do you think? That does to your current self? So your current self is not just a floating entity, it's very heavily impacted by obviously your view of your future and your view of your past.

Pete Cohen  12:09

So what is the view of your future? Again, this is something that a lot of us don't talk about, and that term in psychology called prospection. It is our ability. It is our ability to to create it is our ability to to see, you know, for me last year when my mum was dying, I have struggled with that massively and I took huge solace in chocolate and I was walking in the middle of the night you know why she was being the last hours last days and I would just eat and I just remember stopping in my tracks because you know, I do genuinely have a relationship to my future self. And my future self just said to me, you know, both of your grandparents had diabetes. You carry on doing that you're going on a one way ticket to diabetes, is that something that you want? You know, and I didn't always have that relationship with my future self. I was very insecure as a child. And I was always just kind of running away from my past. I was trying to prove myself I was looking for people to acknowledge me to accept me to tell me I'm this and I'm that I didn't know where I was going. I just knew where I didn't want to be. Now. I'm lucky that I'm enthusiastic. And I love to do great things, but it was never really going anywhere in particular, and it took my wife having had a brain tumor, and not being given very long to live 18 months 11 years ago, or nearly 12 years ago, that I googled the words draw your future, because I wanted her to think about the future. And it made me stop and think about the future. Everything that we do as human beings, everything we do everything we do. I believe as human beings is driven by a desire to get out of pain and our view of the future. Because if your view of the future, if you really stopped and thought okay, if I carry on doing this, and you resort to that, where that would end up you're just like an episode, Ebenezer Scrooge. When Scrooge sees how this is all when he woke up to the reality of the consequences of his actions, he realized he didn't want that. And I believe most people today are living a future that they don't actually want. Why? Because they don't actually have a relationship to the future that they can see. But of course, we all have choices. And if you stopped and thought about if I carried on doing this where would this actually end up being? Maybe you'd stop and go, I don't want to be there. And you'd come back to today. See what shapes our identity what shapes our everything we do is the view of the future. But if it doesn't go very far, if you don't see a future that you're inspired to go out and create, why bother, especially in a world right now that is really lacking hope. There is a science of hope. There is a science of hope right now there is there is it's when you basically believe that your future is better than where you are and how many people believe that there's actually a term in 2012. That's his response was basically talking about Europeans being very pessimistic. In 2012. Is European pessimism. Do we need some optimism right now in the world in America, we've now got the great resignation. We've got this thing in America now. Which is I think it's pretty scary. Have I'm right, you're wrong. That's it. See, rather than waking up and going, hang on a second, what's the antidote to all of this? I mean, that's a it's a big question. And we could debate this for hours. But you know what? I like listening to Matthew McConaughey and his Oscar winning speech, because just like Gandhi said, Be the change that you want to see in this world. Listen to what Matthew McConaughey said,

Matthew McConaughey  15:48

and to my hero. That's who I chase. Now when I was 15 years old, at a very important person, my life come to me and say, who's your hero? And I said, I'm not gonna think about that. Give me a couple of weeks. I come back two weeks later, this person comes up says, who's your hero? I said, I thought about it. You know who it is. I said, it's me in 10 years. So I've turned 2510 years later, that same person comes Mingo so you're a hero. And I was like, not even close. No, no, she said why? I said because my heroes me at 35 So you see every day every week every month and every year my life my heroes always 10 years away. I'm never gonna be my hero. I'm not gonna pain that I know I'm not and that's just fine with me because that keeps me with somebody to keep on Chase. So any of us whatever those things are, whatever it is, we look up to whatever it is we look forward to and whoever it is, we're chasing to that I say amen. To that I say, all right, all right. All right.

Pete Cohen  16:43

You know what's fascinating about that was 2013 You know, when he first started talking, people started laughing. You know, people laugh at when people say they're going to do things, because we just fit in we want to fit into a world. 97.3% of Americans are unhealthy by for basic measures. 97.3% of Americans 50% of Americans are in prescriptive medication. When they're by the time they're 65 years old, or 70%. They're on five different medications. Again, it's not just America, Did you know The average amount of steps that are associated or less than a certain amount of steps is nearly 6000 5640. If you do less than that amount of steps every single day, you're much more prone to anxiety and depression. You know what the average is in the world right now. It's below that heavily below that. So the fact is, but if you don't see the benefit of doing something like that, and you associate pain, and you associate a hard work to it, why bother? We live in a world we're not designed to be in this world. We're living in a world that is killing us. We are not designed to sit still we are not designed to be comfortable. We are designed well. You can tell me. What do you think we're designed to do? I think we're designed to evolve, to grow, to contribute. And now I think there's never been a more important time for us to be the change that we want to see in the world. Listen to Daniel Goldstein.

Daniel Goldstein  18:25

Why do we need commitment devices? Well, resisting temptation is hard as the 19th century English economist nasaw, William Sr. Said to abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results are some of the most painful exertions of the human will. If you set goals for yourself and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible. That's keeping you from achieving them. Is that you lack the self discipline to stick to them, right. It's physically possible to lose weight. It's physically possible to exercise more but resisting temptation is hard. The other reason that it's a difficult to resist temptation is because it's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self. I mean, let's face it, the present self is present. It's in control. It's in power right now. It has these strong heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth, right? And the future self is not even around. It's off in the future. It's weak. It doesn't even have a lawyer present. There's nobody to stick up for the future self and so the present self can trounce all over its dreams.

Pete Cohen  19:39

So one of my goals is to empower people, young people, old people, anybody to build a relationship to your future self. Let me ask you the question, what will be your greatest ever achievement in your life? What will be your greatest achievement? Not what has been, what will be. And I want to play you a clip from Daniel Gilbert, who's a professor at Harvard. And he talks about some studies that were done that made people aware of what they have done in their life. Because we could look at all of this and we could be hard on ourselves and think I'm just you know what I've tried look, I would say you are where you are. This is the best place to be right now. This is the place to be because this is the this is the place you are and that we have this opportunity right now to choose to move our life in a different direction. And I think it's so important for us to be examples to other people. But what Daniel Gilbert talks about, let me give you an example. I have been working with young golfers for many years, and some of them have just graduated from their degree. We've been working with some of them for five years. And I said to some of them the other day, I said, when you think five years ago back and you think about who you are now how many of you consciously chose to be the person that you are today? And they all said none of them. And it just made me think just imagine if we'd help them connect to the person they were going to be in five years time. I know what would have happened they would have worked even harder, because they would have seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They would have seen the fruits of their labor. And we can do it, but we need help in doing it. What will be your greatest achievement is it possible that your greatest ever achievement will be who you become? See Daniel Gilbert, he talks about something that people massively underestimate what they've done. And all of you listening, you know, if you really stop for a moment and you thought of all the things you have done in your life, I'm proud of you of all the things that you've done. You might not have you might have wanted to do a lot of things that you haven't done and you might not be where you want to be. But how many things have you done? How many times have you done something that was difficult or challenging or or build something or was there for someone when they were in their darkest hour? You were there you made a difference? You know what's fascinating about all of that is for most people, it was never conscious in terms of they consciously decided that was what they were going to do a long time ago. It just happened through randomly moving through life, being just someone who's just trying to get by, as opposed to someone who is choosing to impact choosing to make things better. Please take a moment to listen to what Daniel Gilbert says from one of his TED talks with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining, most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be and if we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. Sorry when people say I can't imagine that they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination and not about the unlikelihood of the events that they're describing. The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences, it reshapes our values, it alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect only when we look backwards, do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change. So, so powerful human beings are works in progress, who mistakenly think they're finished. And it's not just adults. In Dr. Benjamin, not sorry, Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about you know, by the time we're 35 95% of who we are as a set of conditioned responses and beliefs and attitudes and people just get set in their way and that this is me, this is me. But in the being of you, how happy are you? How fulfilled Are you? Is a bold statement, I think, so much depression in the world. So much anxiety in the world and frustration is people know,

they're not being who they're capable of being. And boy, do we need to set an example in the world right now? Because this generation that has just gone through what it's has gone through and will continue to go through. They need exemplars, radiant exemplars, of people who show I'm going to be an example to you just watch me. He find that fascinating. There are so many people that think well I've got this heart condition or I've got this depression. This is me, this is how I'm always going to be. And that's why I asked all of you from someone who genuinely cares. And someone who's committed to helping you build a relationship to your future self and then just help you and support you. Bring some intentions into play. Going to round up on this. When I came across a word a few years ago, it completely blew my mind. And it's a Sanskrit word that means hero in the beginning, a Rimberg Assura that the first written words the first written words, think about it, there was a word that meant a hero in the beginning. And I delved into the word even more because I thought, what did that mean? And then someone was explaining that people would start things and not finished them. That's another great reason why a lot of people struggle because they just know, you know, I've tried that in the past. It didn't work. There's no point doing it again, because it isn't going to work and we carry on the narrative. The narrative of telling ourselves who we think we are, we just keep repeating that and if people are happy, that's none of my business, but I don't think most people are. I really don't I think people are looking in the wrong place. Looking for something outside of themselves. I know I was. I was looking for something outside of myself for a long time. And it literally took my wife having a brain tumor for me to really look in a different place

what will be your greatest ever achievement and what does the world need now? More than ever, does it need more? Elon Musk's,

Matthew McConaughey  27:01

that we want to have a future that is inspiring and exciting? And what are the things that you find inspiring and exciting about the future? And I think, one a future where we are a spacefaring civilization and out there among the stars. I think that's every kid gets excited about that. You don't ever need to teach them. They just get it. It's like, instinctive. And so we it's very important for us to have reasons to be like, reasons to be excited about life. Like when you wake up in the morning, it can't just be about problems. It's okay, I know everyone in this room deals with a lot of tough problems. But you know, it's got to be more than that. So, you know, I think a future where you can say, hey, even if it's not you, there's gonna be people out there. They're gonna be we can have a base on the Moon. We're gonna have, you know, a city on Mars, maybe go further. Moons of Jupiter and everything. I think that's a very exciting future. And then, and I think most people do. And you seriously want to be buried on Mars. Just not an impact.

Pete Cohen  28:07

And of course, and of course having a sense of humor about all of this, I think that is so important. It is important to look at where we are and to be kind to ourselves and just to wake up and maybe wake up to the fact that we're living in survival mode A lot of the time when we don't need need to. We're blaming ourselves. We're complaining, we're shaming ourselves. We're getting we're procrastinating, we're ruminating, rather than getting in the game. But this time, we choose the game that we want to play. Rather than playing by someone else's rules, or an outdated version of ourselves. This is something that Will Smith, you know, talks about. He know he talks about changes the only constant thing and he realized after his becoming a rapper, becoming famous, making money, then losing all of it, making some mistakes, not paying his taxes, and then realizing oh my god I need to reinvent myself. So he was given an opportunity. And then he became a TV star on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and then even realizing with that, that wasn't going to last forever. So he realized he'd have to reinvent himself again, which was movies, right? And he's become one of the highest paid movie stars of all time. And then he's having to reinvent himself again after you can imagine he's gonna have to take a good hard look at himself which are met he is I would imagine he feels embarrassed, as he said, because it wasn't in keeping with who is choosing to be and I don't think that most people are choosing to be anything else apart from who they are right now. And if people are happy and feel fulfilled with their lives, then that's amazing. But if there isn't, there's something they can do about it. And I want to wrap this up on just giving you guys another example. So I'm so into future self and the application of it, you know, this is my goal. My goal is that every day people wake up around the world and they're checking in with the person they want to be. And they're practicing building a better future by what they do every day. Not putting things off. It's not about not being in the moment. It's not about being obsessed about the future. No it's knowing that the future actually is now that what you do today will have an impact on tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. But there's an example of this of someone who I had no idea who this person was. His name is Jimmy Donaldson. Have you heard of Jimmy Donaldson? Well, you're going to hear him now. AKA Mr. Beast. And this was a guy six years ago, who made four videos. And in those videos, he was talking to his future self. He scheduled the first video to go out six months the second one a year, the second one five years. And the second 110 years. This was the first video that he made. So you

Mr. Beast  31:01

might be wondering, what are you watching and I just got a random spark of motivation to make a video and schedule upload it six months later. So yeah, I'm making this video right now and I have 8k subs. Hopefully, in six months, I don't still have a k subs. And yeah, I'm just gonna schedule upload this video for six months down the road. And then after this, I'm gonna schedule upload a video for a year, and then five years and then a decade hopefully. If I'm still doing YouTube in a decade, that'd be crazy. But yeah, what would I want to say to me in six months? Um, hopefully you're still uploading daily. Let's see, six months. Hopefully you have at least 15,000 subscribers future me. That'd be embarrassing if I don't then you guys are gonna like Yeah. Yeah,

Pete Cohen  31:50

so you know, it's it's, it's awesome. That was six months then the year video then the five year video. The five year video came out last year. He went from 8000 subscribers to 40 million plus, which is awesome. Right? But what's even more amazing, is between the fifth and the sixth year, which is today, I think he's now got 92 million. There is no better law than the law of compounding and aggregating what will be the greatest thing that I think most people will ever do. It's what they aggregate. It's what they do. It's what they stopped doing. That over time would just lead to things being so much better and it's what they start doing. That would lead to the whole world being different because of what they chose to do. And this is Jimmy Donaldson today

Mr. Beast Speaker  32:41

Yeah. And I like helping people I've always like even when I you know, didn't have much money. If I have money in my world, I just give it away to like homeless people and stuff, which sounds fake. I don't know how to prove it to people. But I will say my overarching goal in life is to make a lot of money and then before I give it away, it's what I want to do. Save that,

Pete Cohen  32:57

no, let's talk so I wonder what your overarching goals are. And again, everybody is different, but what a great conversation to have the way we could talk about this and we can learn from people's experience from everything I know. What I see is human beings are at their best, where they're choosing to grow and they're choosing to contribute. They're choosing to give, and I don't think most of us our best days are over. Our best days are just around the corner. Maybe they're right here, right now. So genuinely from the bottom of my heart. I want to really thank you for listening to what I have to say. And I would love to know what your biggest takeaway is your biggest takeaway, or maybe your biggest takeaway is, who is my future self? And if my future self could come and have a conversation with me, I wonder what my future self would say. I'd love to meet your future self. I love who you are. And I love who you're choosing to become. Thank you so much for listening, guys. Take care.